 They just called their board of the airplane, they'll be at the hospital in one hour and 20 minutes. Dr. Frazier has done more heart transplants than anyone else on the planet. He was a student and a protégé both of Cooley and DeBakey. Dr. Cooley did the first 22 heart transplants here back in the 1960s and early 1970s. Since 1982 when the transplant program restarted, Dr. Frazier has done over a thousand heart transplants. He was a combat surgeon and that had to have been pretty good training for what came later, you know, where the pressure is just constant and the demands are constant. He's basically invented this field, whether it's the left ventricular assist devices, the temporary support, the artificial heart. He worked tirelessly to develop the first, second, third, fourth generation of heart pumps. The first times they were actually used clinically, human beings. Medically, no one persists like him. Everyone will have given up on a patient and he'll take him back to the operating room over and over and over again. And some of those patients, he gets a Christmas card from every year. How are you feeling? Pretty good? He knows every patient. He knows all the family members. He understands where the patients came from. That's an important part of just being who he is. There's something about Dr. Frazier that isn't like anybody else that doesn't have to do with the skill in his hands, but the skill in his heart. Houston, Texas when I was growing up was a couple things. It was NASA and the space program and it was heart surgery. Dr. Cooley had implanted the first artificial heart in 1969. It was all over the papers, all over the magazines. And every time we'd drive in the medical center, my mom would say, that's where Dr. Cooley works, that's where Dr. DeBake works. I mean, I thought of these guys as rock stars. You kind of need to understand Houston history and the psychology of this area to fully understand the history of the artificial heart. This city of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rescued. We choose to go to the road in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. That's what I was inspired by when I was a medical student in 1964. And of course we thought we would do it. They thought, you know, we could do anything. It's a Kennedy generation and we're going to go to the moon, we're going to make an artificial heart. The U.S. said, you know, we are going to get to the moon by the end of the decade and we're going to build a heart. And it seems that nobody thought building the heart was going to be harder than the moon. At a press conference, Dr. Cooley displayed the artificial heart and had this to say, mechanical heart is a feasibility. But as much to be done now is much like embarking on the space program. In those days, particularly the mortality rate was horrendous. I mean, Dr. Cooley and the people in Houston had the best results in the world, but we still, every day we lost someone. Particularly, I remember massaging the heart of a young Italian patient. You know, as long as I was squeezing the heart, he woke up and looked up at me. I thought if my hand could keep him alive, we should be able to make a pump that would do the same thing. Unfortunately, you know, in the 40 years that we're doing now, such a patient, wouldn't die. The heart is just a pump. It's just a pump. Why can't we replace it with something? A lot of people have been looking at that and thinking about that for decades. And here we are all these years later without having fully made the heart that was the stated goal. Pull the heart off the shelf, put it in someone and let them live a meaningful life. This was a 50-year quest to create something that had never been created before. There is a long history of grassroots innovation in every field, but especially in heart surgery. I mean, I'm not making things in this garage and then sewing them in people. We make things in this garage. We do bench studies. We go, aha! Then we start doing some preliminary acute animal studies, then chronic animal studies, then human clinicals. But humble beginnings can lead to great things. Dr. Cooley actually made a heart-lung machine out of materials he got from a restaurant supply house, which is still down in our museum actually. As much as Dr. Cooley was the surgery program, Dr. Frazier is the transplant in the device program. This transplant is a gift. It's a gift from the donor. It's a gift from the doctors. It's a gift from God. Heart transplantation is becoming a common thing now. I'm the oldest living heart transplant in the world. I was 27th in 1983, 30 years ago. We figured it out, and now heart transplantation is a wonderful therapy. But we only have a limited number of donor hearts we can use. In the process of doing heart transplantation, we realized that many patients were too gravely ill to wait for a heart. And the idea was to develop a machine to keep them alive until one could be found. The devices I'm talking about now are the first left ventricular cyst devices, LVADs. And Dr. Frazier and his lab developed those at the Texas Heart Institute laboratories, did the first human implantations and basically led the whole planet in that charge. So I almost died here five years ago. My heart didn't work. And then Dr. Frazier and his team, they took the chance and explained they have a device that could help me. They put the LVAD and I'm working good. I mean, I've had patients that have had this pump for five years and they don't have a pulse. It's now been shown that it is possible to live without a heartbeat. Dr. Frazier said, you know, these pumps are working really well. We need to figure out how we can use them as a total artificial heart. He saw the future with incredible clarity. He said, look, machines can keep people alive. We're not going to be able to make one that beats once a second. They wear out. They're too big. I'll bet the answer is going to be continuous flow. So this will be the first practical mechanical replacement for the failing human heart. Steve Parnas is presenting our work at a meeting in Singapore. And after his talk, a brilliant scientist from Australia named Daniel Thims comes up and says, I got something I could show you one day. And Steve had the wisdom to say, you ought to bring this to Houston and show this to Bud Frazier and Billy Cohn. Immediately, Dr. Cohn and Dr. Frazier realized how brilliant the device was that Daniel had been working on. You know, it's a single device rotary total artificial heart. And so effectively, that means that it can be very, very small and it can be implanted into a lot more people than, of course, the older devices. He said, you know, why have you not been able to get funding for this device in Australia? It's a great idea. I think it's fantastic. He said, yeah, we've been knocking on a lot of doors, but we try. We try to try. And he goes, yeah, look, maybe I understand. He said, maybe they think you're trying to develop a time machine. And of course, time machines are impossible. So nobody's really going to fund you to develop a time machine. But then he said, bring it over to Texas and Houston, because we've been developing time machines for 50 years. The new frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war. I'm asking each of you to be pioneers towards that new frontier. This is the first demonstration ever that you could use a rapidly spinning pump to move blood without injuring the blood. And the first time a human being and human physiology have been supported by continuous, non-pulsatile flow. There's a handful of moments in history where an idea is so big that it forces us to redefine humanity. Wherever this field goes in the future, it will forever be tied to Dr. Frazier and the legacy that's been established here. It's not only Cooley and DeBakey taught Frazier, but I think that Frazier has given a lot to Billy Cone, as much as Billy Cone has given to him. I've definitely changed my mindset about what you can accomplish if you just stay on top of it and never give up. And I think this thing that he's created is going to outlast him by 100 years. And it's such a rare and precious thing, and yet in the center of the cyclone is quiet, modest bud Frazier. Hold up in his office reading Shakespeare or the history of the Civil War, you know? And I feel part of my role is to evangelize this, to make sure that everybody understands the protean impact he's had on our world. I think all you can do is just continue to work and think what we've been blessed with in Houston is a milieu where you can do that. I mean, the great thing about Houston has been the support from the community. I mean, the whole Texas Medical Center was built by philanthropy. It was built by M. D. Anderson, it was built by Mr. Cullen, built by the Brown Brothers. Citizens that wanted to make things better, wanted to do something worthwhile. And that's why so many cardiovascular firsts have come out of Houston, that can do spirit. It's the medical center, it's the cardiovascular legacy, and it's the culture that Bud Frazier has created at the Texas Heart Institute in St. Luke's.